6 Mar
2011
6 Mar
'11
2:36 p.m.
On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:32:34 +0000 Always Learning centos@g7.u22.net wrote:
On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember "byte" being a synonym for "bit field" and a byte could be any number of bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit bytes were quite common on such machines.
PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters.
Baby? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10
BR, Bob